Andrew W. Cohen argues in The Racketeer's Progress that historians severely misunderstand Progressivism and the New Deal. Historians claim that by 1900 or so a modern economy had come into being, an economy characterized by integrated and cooperative commerce and manufacturing produced by class-bound industrial workers guided by a separate and impermeable class of managers, stockholders, and professionals, themselves overseen by big business leaders. Although prosperous for all, this economy triggered economic, social and political problems, which were not finally solved until managers et al. finally extended Progressivism into the New Deal sufficiently to control such a complex and interrelated society-economy. Thus, the New Deal originated from Progressive ideas largely generated by modern business leaders or associated intellectuals. New Deal in place, all were happy. Historians further believe that unionized labor resisted efforts by the state to regulate or change working or social conditions. However, reading Chicago history as indicative of national history, Cohen says the opposite is true: that modernization was violent and contested, that social classes were permeable, that unions and government cooperated (indeed, that they were in large degree coterminous [p.7]), and that urban workers and small businessmen invented and applied New Deal cartelization remedies to restrain excessive competition locally long before they were reapplied nationally in the 1930s. The New Deal, thus, was not the triumph of Progressive bureaucratic social management, but the result of the percolation up of long-accepted local urban arrangements. Finally, Cohen claims that the pattern of union extortion and racketeering to protect work territories and prices from new ways or providers so common in 1920s Chicago was validated by similar New Deal regulations; thus, Chicago unions' thuggery was not really criminal. In sum, Cohen argues that the New Deal was no more than federal compulsion that local small business remedies to local competitive disruptions (common in the 1920s) be applied nationally, especially by large corporations.

I do not think The Racketeer's Progress anywhere proves its case. But in its telling, it presents much colorful and personal early-twentieth-century history of Chicago (a place always fun to visit), and some useful insights and reminders. Its evidence is selective quotation from Chicago court cases, newspaper reports, and union and business association archives. The book's argument appears to be that any example inconsistent with the overstated historical consensus disproves the consensus, and that correlation is causation. For instance, that Chicago business leaders did not universally embrace the cooperation with public, workers, and competitors championed by luminaries of the National Civic Federation proves that these ideas did not influence reform then or later (pp. 34–35). That the New Deal cartelized employers and employees just as Chicago craftsmen and small employers had tried to do in the 1920s (pp. 86–87) shows that “New Deal industrial policies originated in the … storefronts, saloons, and union halls of cities like Chicago” (p. 265). Of course, this is inadequate reasoning. Human history is chaotic (because the records are so jumbled, inadequate, diverse, and self-servingly misleading), so one seldom finds any monolithic body of acts and opinions. Furthermore, Adam Smith told us long ago that “people of the same trade seldom meet together … but the conversation ends in … some contrivance to raise prices,” and the ways to raise prices—restrain production and allot exclusive territories—have remained relatively constant. Thus, that 1920s Chicago small shopkeepers and labor leaders tried to cartelize trade and production as did the New Deal does not mean that Chicago shopkeepers and labor leaders authored the New Deal. I could go on, but the long and the short of it is that Cohen's claim that the New Deal percolated up from the bottom rather than descended from Progressive thought to be imposed from the federal top down is unproved.

The Racketeer's Progress does not do what it claims to do, but it does several nice things. Its many case studies of Chicago unions attempting to exclude this or that worker—blacks from nearly everything, women from men's work—exemplifies that (generally) somebody must be unemployed at a job if its wage is to be raised above the competitive equilibrium wage. Its documentation of the entanglement of the building trades with local government confirms for Chicago a general truth: growing cities generate many contracts, so the building trades stay close to government and trade for favors. Its documentation of unions' use of illegal tactics (such as demanding bribes not to bring the workforce out on strike or in protest of “unsafe” working conditions [p. 104]) at smaller and more isolated work sites is consistent with economists' notion that illegal activities will be used more where they cost less, and such illegal activities are less costly for unions with clout at city hall and with public sympathy (unions are depraved because they are deprived). Its documentation that larger and more capital-intensive chain movie theaters were more unionized than other capital-intensive employers is consistent with (although it certainly does not prove) the argument that producers of publicly consumed services are greatly vulnerable to threats of violence or intimidation (such as a stink bomb dropped in the dark) argued by Roger Faith and me. Its documentation that unions and employers cooperated to cartelize and protect industries finds for Chicago what we predicted (“An Agency Theory of Unionism,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 8, no. 1 [March 1987]: 39–60).

Cohen's most difficult argument for me to summarize and evaluate is in the title. Cohen contends that labeling unions engaging in price fixing or bombing or maiming or extorting as “racketeering” had profound consequences for unionism (pp. 261–63). At first, racketeers engineered conspiracies as well as violence. But the New Deal required price fixing, and implicitly equated racketeers only with violent criminals. So unions, defined as racketeers, became suspected criminals. Unions' legal status then depended upon the goodwill of criminal justice officials, Cohen argues. This forced unions to abandon efforts to justify their actions (conspiracies against consumers and other producers), which Cohen feels are justifiable, in favor of toadying-up to politicians, who by not defining them as racketeers would permit unions to enjoy the benefits of the National Labor Relations Act. But toadying-up unions stopped justifying themselves to the public and so made themselves vulnerable to changes in politicians' perceptions, as unions now had no independent source of power. Having lavished all their attentions upon politicians, unions had no remaining channels to influence the public. If I have it right, this is an argument with great potential. However, without a theory of unions or a convincing understanding of why crime and unions are so interrelated, Cohen is unable to develop it. All in all, The Racketeer's Progress is an unrewarding read.